Toronto International Film Festival 2017
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made, I’m inclined to give the latter the edge. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over years spent living together as adults, while they wrote their separate work and watched the same movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 2: The Death of Stalin, Molly’s Game
In its own way, it’s an enlightening experience to attend, at least once, a Big TIFF Premiere, which I didn’t do during my first time attending last year. The Death of Stalin premiered in the Winter Garden, a venue on the seventh floor of a building whose ground level houses the Elgin theater; per Wikipedia — in a phrase which Googling only traces to there, so perhaps there’s a different way to refer to this — they are the world’s only surviving “stacked Edwardian theaters.” The Elgin seats 1,561, the Winter 992, so you can gauge the perceived star value and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 1: Canadian Border Security, Call Me By Your Name, Bodied
It’s customary, when diving into a series of festival dispatches, to include some prefatory, contextualizing stuff up top, which has always been tough for me. This year, though, reality has made it easy: by having me arrive at Sundance a day late thanks to Air Force Two speeding Trump off to the inauguration, and in Canada in the form of a border security official, one officer Nicoara. I’d remembered last year that Canadian customs is a little more severe than you’d expect: I think I answered about five minutes’ worth of questions about anything and everything relating to my TIFF […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 8, 2017 -
25 Films We’re Looking Forward to at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival got underway today with Janus Metz’s Borg/McEnroe as Opening Night and a number of heavily anticipated Fall titles — including mother!, Battle of the Sexes, Downsizing, I, Tonya — making either their world or North American premieres. Vadim Rizov will be on the ground filing his critics dispatches for Filmmaker, and we’ll have select interviews and other editorial as the fest goes on. But before diving into our preview of 25 films we’re especially excited about, I want to comment on what may be TIFF’s biggest news this year, which arrived a week before the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 7, 2017 -
First Reformed: Paul Schrader vs. Slow Cinema
In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema. “It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time,” he said. “It’s a dead end. […] There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 30, 2017
